I can't remember what brought me to this show about millennial women in the fashion magazine industry - a podcast? a tweet? - but I know what made me stay through all ten episodes above all odds. It was the writing. It just felt so real, so true, and so unlike any other depictions of what I'll call "career-oriented" twenty-somethings. It seems like when it comes to depicting the workplace, every female character my age on television in the last five years or so has been some combination of clueless, lazy, extremely online, underpaid, disinterested, immature, and completely lost. First to come to my mind is Aubrey Plaza's April Ludgate on Parks and Recreation. A true archetype! Fleshed out into an actual adult woman over the course of seven seasons, sure, but for a while there she was just the bored, aggressively antisocial intern doodling on her jeans. Or picture Katrina Bowden, easily the most forgettable castmember of 30 Rock as Liz Lemon's assistant, whose sole purpose on the show was to be a sex object for the male writers and a reminder of how old and frumpy every other female character was. (Let's call this "sheetcake feminism," Tina Fey.)
More broadly and generically, picture the bug-eyed mousy intern just fetching coffee for people and thanking them along the way. Picture the hipsters in beanies and glasses pitching what could "go viral" to disinterested and confused bosses. Everyone is drunk or stoned or hungover or both. A lot of them ask horribly dumb questions like "what's a CD?" just to make the thirty-something main characters feel impossibly old. And then when the millennials are the main characters, the basic premise always seems to revolve around how broke they are, how fucked over the recession has left them, how wrought with college debt they are. I mean think of the show 2 Broke Girls - it's right there in the title. Or think of Broad City or Girls and how in those shows, being a young woman at a workplace mostly means just routinely fucking up in hilarious and embarrassing fashion.
So it's refreshing to have a show like The Bold Type where three young professional women are just sort of, you know, ambitious pretty good employees. Do they fuck up sometimes? Of course they do, it's a workplace television show, we've got to let them learn things the hard way. Are they online? Oh they are extremely online, to the point where one of them is the magazine's social media director at the age of, like, 23. But this is a show that treats such a job like the real thing it is in 2017 and not simply an absurd idea. Are they all boy-crazy little nymphets running around creating love triangles? I mean, yes, sort of, but that's only maybe like ten or twenty percent of what they do - they really are very career-focused and talented and upwardly mobile!
Here's the part where I can't resist a little disclaimer, a little face-saving attempt of an insistence that, no, this is not a "good" show in the strict, curated sense of the word. I'm not calling this a must-watch! I'm not saying it's the big breakout hit of 2017. I mean the thing airs on Freeform for fuck's sake. Do you know what Freeform is? It is what they now call ABC Family, the channel that earlier this summer finished airing the seventh and final season of Pretty Little Liars. This is not prestige TV. But you know what? Prestige TV can go suck an egg. Who needs more prestige TV? What we need are more shows like this one, that are well-made and only a little dumb and filled with the types of characters and experiences that don't exist elsewhere on television.
And that's my take on The Bold Type, a show I didn't love, but liked more than I ever thought I would have.
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